Building the Agile Enterprise: With SOA, BPM and MBM : with SOA, BPM and MBM

In the last ten years IT has brought fundamental changes to the way the world works. Not only has it increased the speed of operations and communications, but it has also undermined basic assumptions of traditional business models and increased the number of variables. Today, the survival of major corporations is challenged by a world-wide marketplace, international operations, outsourcing, global communities, a changing workforce, security threats, business continuity, web visibility, and customer expectations. Enterprises must constantly adapt or they will be unable to compete. Fred Cummins, an EDS Fellow, presents IT as a key enabler of the agile enterprise. He demonstrates how the convergence of key technologies--including SOA, BPM and emerging enterprise and data models--can be harnessed to transform the enterprise. Cummins mines his 25 years experience to provide IT leaders, as well as enterprise architects and management consultants, with the critical information, skills, and insights they need to partner with management and redesign the enterprise for continuous change. No other book puts IT at the center of this transformation, nor integrates these technologies for this purpose. "Building the Agile Enterprise not only covers many corner stones of enterprise agility, it delivers an integrated view of how agility is enabled by policies and a business awareness supported by technology architecture/design patterns. Fred Cummins has hit the mark by aggregating the many tributaries of agility instead of picking one pattern and/or technology. This is a sophisticated and integrated atlas that is a challenge for IT professionals to implement, but a must for flourishing organizations." ~Jim Sinur, Vice President, Gartner "Never before has technology been so close to the business. In fact, technology is becoming more and more embedded in the business. This means that change has to go hand in hand on both at the business and the technology side, - or that technology has to at least support the high demands of business change. In particular, enterprise agility is a major requirement for those organizations that want to succeed in this new world dominated by rapid change. Business are increasingly asked to change and to react quickly to changes in market conditions - look at what's happening currently in the car manufacturing space with the increases in petrol prices or in the financial community with the sub-prime crises as just two examples. This book provides a marvelous, clear, and comprehensive road map of how key technologies such as service-oriented architecture, business process management, and model-based management are instrumental and key in realizing a truly agile enterprise. It explains why and how a structured and strategic approach to SOA, along with the adoption of other available paradigms and technologies, can enable future enterprise agility. As Fred sugge...